Republicans, the party of the nation's entitled rich, are holding a knife to the throat of America's frail recovery.

The GOP sore losers have America up against a wall. Republicans don't
care that the majority of the country voted for a candidate who
promised to raise taxes on the rich. Republicans don't care that an even
larger majority - 60 percent
- told election day pollsters they wanted those taxes raised.
Republicans don't care about majority-rule democracy at all. They're
demanding ransom - extension of tax cuts for the rich. If Americans
don't submit, Republicans will slash the nation's economy.

"Back away from your Social Security, your Medicare, your Medicaid,"
the Republicans are ordering. The GOP insists those crucial social
insurance programs be sacrificed to prevent the entitled rich from once
again paying the income tax rates that they did during the boom years of
Bill Clinton. The party that lost the Presidency, lost seats in the
House and lost seats in the Senate is willing to take down the economy,
to eviscerate programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the
Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Aviation
Administration rather than require the entitled rich pull their weight
as citizens of the country that enabled them to live lives of
unprecedented luxury.

The candidate Republicans chose as their presidential nominee, Mitt
Romney, stated the party's position loud and clear last spring and
reiterated it during a phone call last week with his millionaire
financiers. Romney told funders in May that he had no intention of
"worrying about" 47 percent of Americans who he described as moochers, citizens he slandered with the allegation that they refuse to "take personal responsibility."

In the phone call last week, Romney claimed that the Americans he
referred to as government moochers all voted for President Obama because
the Democrat gave them "gifts." Romney, a quarter-billionaire,
described the administration's plan for partial forgiveness of college
loan interest as a "gift" to students. The Republican candidate born
into wealth and pampered in private schools characterized as a "gift"
the requirement in Obamacare that health insurance companies provide
prescription contraceptives without co-payments.

The rich boy said President Obama bought women's votes for $10 co-pay
forgiveness. But for Republicans, it's never the other way around.
Romney and the GOP don't think they were buying the votes of the rich
with their promise to add another 20 percent break on top of the Bush
tax cuts for the wealthiest.

That's because they believe they're entitled. They derisively refer
to the social safety net programs that prevent the nation's poor and
elderly from being reduced to eating cat food as "entitlements." But
it's the entitled rich - Romney, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and
their ilk - who demand that America give them "stuff" like tax breaks
for sending jobs overseas, like tax loopholes for hoarding their assets
in the Caymans, like government-paid roads and sewers and rail lines to
their businesses.

The entitled rich and their political party don't seem to get the
fact that they lost the election. Eighty CEOs have ponied up $37 million
to make sure the so-called fiscal cliff problem is resolved their way.
They're saying, basically, they're willing to give up one of the "couple of Cadillacs" they drive if the middle class just accepts cat food as its meat course. The CEOs, calling themselves the "Fix the Debt" coalition,
claim they'll pay a secret amount more in taxes if the 99 percent
suffers cuts to its social safety net and endures slashed government
programs.

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Republicans in Congress won't even go that far. Their legislation would give more to the rich and less to everyone else.
They've proposed, for example, extending the estate tax cuts that
benefit the richest 0.3 percent of American families when their
millionaire relatives die, an estimated 7,000 people in 2013. At the
same time, Republicans are demanding an end to child tax credit and
earned income tax credit enhancements that help 13 million families get
by, families that include 26 million children. Those 7,000 entitled
rich people and their Republican representatives believe 26 million kids
can always join the grandmas dining on cat food. Tastes like chicken,
right?

Democrats don't want to risk damaging the economy. They've proposed extending the tax cuts for the 98 percent right now.
The richest two percent would benefit from these breaks as well,
receiving them on the first $250,000 of their earnings. Everybody gets
something. This proposal passed the Democratic-controlled Senate. The
Republican-controlled House refuses to even vote on it.

Republicans aren't talking about extending tax breaks for the 98
percent. Instead, they're threatening the economic life of the country
if they don't get what they want - tax breaks for people who don't need
them.

Law enforcement experts discourage paying off blackmailers and kidnappers.

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President Obama is right to take that advice and refuse to pay the
ransom Republicans are demanding to appease the entitled rich.